[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[January 18, 2000]
[Pages 67-71]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks on the National Firearms Enforcement Initiative in Boston, 
Massachusetts
January 18, 2000

    Well, Mayor, I was just thinking that 
you should hope that Detective Holmes stays in 
police work and out of politics. [Laughter] Didn't she give a good 
speech? Let's give her another hand. That's great. [Applause] I thought 
it was great.
    Mr. Mayor; Senator Kennedy; Representative Joe Moakley; Barney Frank; Mike 
Capuano; to Commissioner Evans and all the members of the Boston Police Department 
that are here; representatives of law enforcement who have come to 
Boston today to be with us--Jerry Flynn of the 
International Brotherhood of Police Officers, Tom Nee of the National Association of Police Organizations--I 
thank you all for welcoming us.
    I want to say that in addition to the Attorney General, we are joined today by Treasury Under Secretary Jim 
Johnson; the Director of Alcohol, Tobacco, 
and Firearms Division, Brad Buckles; and 
of course, as the Attorney General mentioned, our United States 
attorney, Don Stern.
    I also want to thank Lynn Jackson for 
welcoming us to Orchard Gardens Community Center. She was nervous when 
she got up here to speak. I said, ``Go on, you're supposed to start.'' 
She said, ``I'm not supposed to start until they sit down.'' So I said, 
``You go up there and speak. I'll make them sit down.'' [Laughter] So 
then when you stood up for Lisa Holmes, she 
said, ``Make them sit down. Make them sit down.'' I said, ``Not on your 
life.'' [Laughter]
    Let me say to all of you, I am profoundly grateful to the people of 
Boston and the State of Massachusetts for being so good to me and to my 
family and to our administration. I've been running over in my mind all 
the wonderful moments I've had here just since 1991 when I first started 
exploring whether I should run for President, the first time I visited 
City Year here in Boston, the day I spent--Commissioner Evans and the mayor took a 
half a day with the Attorney General and me to 
explain what you'd done to lower juvenile crime and lower dramatically 
the fatalities among children in this community--all the other 
incredible times I have spent in this city and in this State, including 
the times that Hillary and Chelsea and I have been vacationers here and 
contributed, I might add, to the tax base of Massachusetts. [Laughter]
    But this is a special day for me, because it is an enormous source 
of pride for me to stand up after hearing a community leader, a police 
officer, the mayor, your Representatives in the United States Congress, 
and our Attorney General talk about what you have done to give real life 
and real freedom back to this community.
    When I ran for President, the biggest issue on most people's minds 
was the economy. Here I am in Boston, just south of New Hampshire; 8 
years ago, I would have been up there today. But they were all concerned 
about the banks closing and people having their mortgages foreclosed and 
all these other problems. But I knew that the challenges facing America 
were not simply economic and that we had to have a policy to try to move 
people from welfare to work, we had to have a policy to try to open up 
educational opportunities to all of our young

[[Page 68]]

people, and we had to have a policy to lower the crime rate.
    In Washington, the primary debate then was whether we needed more 
prevention or tougher punishment and whether the Federal Government 
ought to just give speeches about it, because it was primarily a local 
problem, or give money and walk away. Well, I felt that on both counts, 
we should do both.
    The first elected job I ever had was attorney general of my State. 
Before that, when I was a young lawyer, and even when I was a law 
student, I used to teach criminal law, criminal procedure, and 
constitutional law to law enforcement officials. I have always been 
interested in this, and I have always been convinced that we had to have 
the proper balance of punishment and prevention and that the police 
could never do it alone, not without the community, not without the 
people in the street and the neighborhoods, not without the parents and 
the kids, people who want the blessings of a normal, safe life in every 
neighborhood in this country.
    And so we've been working to try to give you the tools to do both, 
to prevent more crime, to save more kids, to effectively punish those 
who violate the law. In 1993 we passed the Brady bill. The Congress 
passed it; it had previously passed, but it had been vetoed by the 
previous President. I signed it and said I wanted to sign it, and I 
believed in it. And I heard all that talk about how terrible it was 
going to be and what an awful burden it is. And now we have almost half 
a million felons, fugitives, and stalkers who have not been able to get 
handguns because of the Brady bill, and not a single hunter in America 
who's been inconvenienced. It was the right thing to do. There are more 
citizens alive; there are more police officers alive today because the 
Brady law is in effect.
    In 1994 the crime bill provided funds for 100,000 police officers 
over a 6-year period. Thanks to the leadership of the Attorney 
General and those working with her, we 
distributed those funds and got those folks hired, under budget and 
ahead of schedule. We passed the assault weapons ban, cracked down on 
illegal gun dealing to young people, kept an eye out also for the most 
innovative local crime-fighting strategies like Operation Cease Fire 
here in Boston.
    Now, the things you have done and the things we've tried to help you 
do have transformed life in America. As the Attorney General said, the 
crime rate's dropped now for 7 years in a row. The overall crime rate's 
at its lowest level in 25 years. The murder rate is the lowest level 
nationwide in 31 years; gun crime down 35 percent; juveniles committing 
homicides with guns down 57 percent; gun prosecutions up at all levels 
of government, local, State, and Federal. Federal firearms prosecutions 
are higher today than they were in 1992, but they're up 25 percent just 
since 1998 to 1999; those convicted of Federal gun crimes serving longer 
sentences. We are trying to send a message, an unambiguous message, to 
people who violate the law: If you commit crimes with guns or violate 
gun laws, you will pay a heavy price.
    No city has sent that message more clearly than Boston. But your 
message is more than that. You have made us know that this is not just a 
numbers game. You have shown that to reduce crime most and therefore to 
increase freedom most among your families, your children, and your 
neighborhoods, prosecutions must be targeted where they'll have the 
greatest impact--in Boston's case, on violent repeat offenders and on 
gun traffickers who supply them.
    You have also shown that there needs to be a team effort, 
partnerships with citizens and leaders in every community, focused on 
saving kids and preventing crime before it occurs. And so after all 
these years of effort and the leadership of your great mayor and others, you have made Boston one of the safest 
cities in America. It is essential to making America what we want it to 
be in the 21st century.
    You know, yesterday we celebrated the annual holiday honoring Dr. 
Martin Luther King's birthday. And I was honored to sign the bill that 
made it not only a national holiday but a national day of service. We 
call it a day on, not a day off. Yesterday, in keeping with my 
tradition, I went to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Washington, DC, with a 
group of citizens called Greater DC Cares and some young AmeriCorps 
volunteers, and we worked on rehabbing a facility. But in preparation 
for that day, I thought about all the other King holidays we've had 
since I've been President and an astonishing opportunity I had back in 
1993 to speak in the Mason Temple Church of God in Christ in Memphis, 
Tennessee. That's where Dr. King spoke the night before he was killed.
    We had all the leaders of that great church in America there, at a 
time when America was

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a much more unsafe place. And I just started thinking off the top of my 
head, with the crowd. I said, ``You know, if Dr. King could come back to 
Earth today, what would he say?'' He'd say we've done a pretty good job 
of integrating our society, and we have more African-Americans and other 
minorities moving into the middle class, taking jobs in public service, 
being fairly compensated for what they do. But he would be sick by the 
crime and violence that is ravaging all the poor neighborhoods of this 
country. And he would say, ``I want you to know I did not live and die 
so that children could destroy children, so that children could destroy 
themselves with drugs and become millionaires destroying the lives of 
other children.''
    And a lot of you are nodding your heads about that. This is a 
different country today because of you. Yes, those things still happen, 
but now America knows we can make it better. All you have to do is tell 
somebody the story of Boston and all cynicism disappears, all skepticism 
disappears. Everybody knows we can make it better. We don't have to give 
up on our kids. We don't have to give up on our neighborhoods. We don't 
have to tolerate a level of fear and violence and crime and insecurity 
that no civilized society will tolerate.
    Now, that is the good news, and we can all celebrate that good news. 
But if I were to ask you this question--and I won't make you do it--but 
if I were to ask you this question, if I were to say to you, ``Now, 
everybody that now thinks that Boston and Massachusetts and America are 
safe enough, please raise your hand,'' nobody would raise their hand, 
right? Even though we're at a 31-year low in the murder rate, even 
though the juvenile murder rate with guns has gone way down, even though 
the crime rate's at a 25-year low, nobody believes that America is as 
safe as it ought to be. No one who knows anything believes that all of 
our kids are as safe in their childhood as they ought to be.
    And so I say to you, what are we going to do with this moment of 
promise? We don't have any excuses anymore. You know, maybe 7 years ago 
people could throw up their hands and say, ``Oh, we can't make it 
better. Just support the police, lock them up longer, and hope someday 
it'll get better.'' Nobody really knew.
    Now we know. We don't have any excuses now. We know how to drive the 
crime rate down, down, down. And we know how to keep kids out of trouble 
in the first place. We know how to save children. I think it's time we 
had the real goal we ought to have as a nation. We ought to say, ``Okay, 
we got the crime rate down. Here's our real goal: We want America to be 
the safest big country in the entire world.''
    We can do that, not with a silver bullet but by continuing to build 
on what has worked. And in my new budget and in the State of the Union 
Address, I'm going to ask the Congress and the country to continue to 
move forward in the direction that has worked. Today I want to announce 
to you five specific initiatives that I believe will help us a lot.
    First, in my new budget I will call for hiring 500 new ATF agents 
and inspectors, the largest increase in ATF firearms enforcement ever. 
These new agents and inspectors will help us to crack down on violent 
gun criminals, illegal gun traffickers, and bad-apple dealers, a small 
percentage of the dealers who supply a very large percentage of the guns 
that go to criminals and to kids.
    Second, we will add, as the Attorney General said, 1,000 new 
Federal, State, and local prosecutors to help take dangerous gun 
criminals out of our communities and put them where they belong, behind 
bars.
    Third, to strengthen the hand of the prosecutors, we will invest 
more in the ATF's national gun tracing center and supply local law 
enforcement agencies with the tools they need to utilize that center, 
from computers to training. We want to make it possible and we can make 
it possible to trace the origin of every single gun used in every single 
crime in the United States.
    Fourth, we will create a groundbreaking national ballistics network 
that eventually will enable us to trace almost any bullet left at a 
crime scene anywhere in America to the gun of the criminal who fired it.
    Fifth, the budget provides local communities with grants to run the 
same kind of anti-gun-violence media campaigns that have been such an 
important part of the successful strategy used to reduce gun crime here 
in Boston or in Richmond or in other cities which have tried it.
    All together, these efforts represent the largest national gun 
enforcement initiative in the history of the United States. They will 
help communities across America to push violent crime rates down by 
cracking down harder on gun criminals and, again, by interrupting the 
flow to prevent more crimes.

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    But I ask Congress to support them and also ask Congress to start 
this new century by abandoning another stale debate. For in addition to 
the old debate about whether we should focus on punishment or prevention 
and whether the Federal Government should make speeches or give money, 
there's a debate that unfortunately hasn't died out in Washington, and 
that's about whether it's better to strengthen the enforcement of the 
existing gun laws or to have strengthened gun laws.
    The truth is, just like the other questions, the real answer is, we 
should do both. That's what we've done with the Brady bill. That's what 
we have done with the assault weapons ban. And we should do more. The 
drop in the crime rate has been due both to changing laws and to better 
enforcement and better prevention.
    Last year we passed some sensible measures in the United States 
Senate, thanks to the help of Senator Kennedy and with the Vice President 
casting a tie-breaking vote. As he says, whenever he has to vote, we 
win. [Laughter] So by one vote, we were able to defeat the high-pressure 
tactics of the NRA to pass an important advance in doing background 
checks at gun shows and urban flea markets, having child safety locks 
for all new handguns, a ban on importing large capacity ammunition 
clips. But we couldn't pass it in the House of Representatives, even 
after the travesty of Columbine High School. I believe passing 
commonsense gun safety legislation should be the very first action of 
this Congress.
    I will say again, to all the people who listen to these arguments, 
there has been no discernible increase in the burden on any law-abiding 
sportsperson in this entire country with the Brady bill and the assault 
weapons ban, but we've saved a lot of lives of kids, police officers, 
and citizens. And closing the gun show loophole, which is something I 
know something about because they're very popular in my part of the 
country, or the urban flea market loophole or banning the import of 
these large capacity ammunition clips, which people can't manufacture 
and sell here at home anyway, or requiring these child safety locks for 
kids is an important advance, and it ought to be done. It'll have the 
same impact that the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban did. It 
won't cause anybody who is law-abiding any hassle, but it'll save lives. 
It's important that we do this, too.
    I also want to say I think it's important that the gun industry take 
more responsibility in changing the way it designs, markets, and 
distributes firearms. [Applause] And let me say to all of you who care 
about this--there was some spontaneous applause there--you should know 
this. There are responsible citizens in the gun industry who actually 
want to work with us to find new ways to make sure the guns they sell 
don't wind up in the wrong hands and that kids aren't killed 
accidentally with them. Part of the answer may be in new technologies 
that could reduce accidents.
    I want all of you to listen to this. The law enforcement officers 
probably won't be surprised by this, but this is important that you know 
this. The accidental gun death rate of children under 15 in the United 
States is 9 times higher than that in the other 25 biggest industrial 
countries combined--combined. We don't have to put up with that either. 
Technologies now exist that could lead to guns that can only be fired by 
the adults who own them. My budget helps the gun industry accelerate the 
development of this technology. So we need to support that as well.
    In his last campaign in 1968, Robert Kennedy said the fight against 
crime, and I quote, ``is a fight to preserve that quality of community 
which is at the root of our greatness.'' We saw something about the root 
of America's greatness today here in Orchard Gardens: a community leader 
proud of her center; a police officer who grew up just a stone's throw 
from here; elected leaders who know the people who live in this area, 
whom they represent; a mayor proud of the progress that people working 
together can do; all these people in uniform justifiably proud of what 
they have achieved. That's what this is all about, all of us working 
together and helping each other.
    I say again, for all the progress we have made, we should never 
rest, not any of us, as long as there's one more child whose life needs 
to be saved, as long as there's one more kid that can be turned away 
from drugs and guns and violence and kept out of prison in the first 
place, as long as there's one more street to make safe. We shouldn't 
quit until your country, your State, and your community are the safest 
places in the world.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:20 p.m. in the Orchard Gardens Community 
Center. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Thomas M. Menino

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of Boston; Lisa Holmes, detective, and Paul F. Evans, commissioner, 
Boston Police Department; Gerald Flynn, alternate national vice 
president, International Brotherhood of Police Officers; Thomas J. Nee, 
executive vice president, National Association of Police Organizations; 
and Lynn Jackson, director, Orchard Gardens Community Center.